In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence… Source In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that ...

ABC News reported on an Australian gentleman who’s vape battery resulted in the combustion of his trousers : The Northern NSW Local Health District (LHD) has confirmed a 56-year-old Brisbane man went to Byron Central Hospital at 3:15pm on Saturday. It is understood he told the hospital he had coins in his pocket, along with a vape containing a lithium-ion battery. According to FRNSW data, there have been 38 battery-related incidents categorised as involving “small portable devices...

Guinea fowl keets are doing great too. All 5 are loving life with their foster mums. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Guinea fowl keets are doing great too. All 5 are loving life with their foster mums. ...

This is the first in an ongoing ad-hoc series of posts on Apache Kafka performance. I have no general direction, I’ll just share interesting insights based on the performance testing I do on Apache Kafka. Recently I was curious to see if there was any general performance improvement since Kafka 3.X. So I ran a suite of benchmarks with Dimster against 3.7.2 and 4.3.0. I saw two common patterns: Pattern 1: Low load benchmarks showed that end-to-end latency was higher with Kafka 4.3 compared t...

This morning I released sqlite-utils 4.0 , the 124th release of that project and the first major version bump since 3.0 in November 2020. In addition to some small but significant breaking changes (described in this upgrade guide ), this version introduces three major features: database migrations , nested transactions (via a new db.atomic() method), and support for compound foreign keys . Database schema migrations using sqlite-utils Schema migrations define a sequence of changes ...

I recently read Alan Alda's first memoir  Never have your dog stuffed   which was pretty good. Hence I began looking for more information about him on the web. I came across a YouTube video   At 89, Alan Alda reveals the seven actors he HATED the most .  Gee, in the book he didn't hate anyone. So I was curious what this was about. This could be interesting.  It was not . The title was extremely deceptive. (More than most clickbait?)  Here is the list and what was said about them: Wayne ...

The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, via WorldHistory.org . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber! Housing Someone making the (somewhat dub...

A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call and asks to try again. That alone is not too surprising as models emit malformed tool calls...

The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi . A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4 . But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s. What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s run at 1.8 GHz, and can usually be overclocked). The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured abo...

55% of US workers were burned out as of late 2025, a six-year high, based on Eagle Hill Consulting data. Estimates for 2026 range from 44% to 82%, depending on how each survey defines burnout. This post covers current figures on prevalence, cost, demographics, work arrangement, and the new AI variable. Employee Burnout Statistics – TL;DR 55% of US workers are currently burned out, a six-year high (Eagle Hill Consulting, November 2025). 72% report moderate-to-high stress, the highest r...

You may not know the Aechelon name, but if  you’ve  flown for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, or Special Operations community,  there’s  a good chance  you’ve trained in one of our simulators. That’s   probably not  where  you’d expect a company that started making visual effects for movies to end up. About 27 years ago, I  ran  a company  focused on  special effects, and one day somebody came to us and asked, “Can you guys build us a flight sim...

The ninth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 9, I chat with Rachel, the author of kwon.nyc and curator of " The internet used to be* fun *(It still is, but it used to be, too) ". We talk about, among other things, metaphors for the web, creative mediums on the web, physical creative spaces, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. kwon.nyc The internet used to be*...

This project exists because I bought 30 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM for an EPYC build in early April: an r/homelabsales find at $80 a stick, which was a fair price that day. The problem is that “that day” turned out to be the exact top of the market. Buying the top is pretty standard for me. Then the server wouldn’t POST with at least 4 of the sticks installed, and of the 16 that made it in, 4 more start throwing ECC errors the moment I do anything memory-heavy (LLM inferencing, which i...

Welcome to a linked rundown of global developments in the exploration of our Moon across the first half of 2026. There’s also a section on global outlook because we must not forget our interconnectedness and collective action needs over sovereign interests. Each linked article below explains and contextualizes said development. As usual, I make a conscious effort to curate events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of upcoming events that may or may n...

I finally have time to flesh out ideas for lessons that I’ve wanted for years. However, if I can’t find a way to send them back to 2006, there’s no point writing them: very few people read long-form tutorials about software these days. I’d still be interested in comments, though—figuring out what I would teach always helps me learn. Overview Topic : Error handling. Audience : Senior undergraduates who are comfortable writing programs in Python and JavaScript that are hundred of l...

Go 1.26 rebuilt go fix from scratch. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a spin: it rewrites the code in your module to use modern language and library features. It has quickly become one of my favorite features, and LLMs are a big part of why. Models tend to use old APIs, and sometimes they deny that a new API exists even when you point them to it. Coaxing a model is non-deterministic. go fix is a better way to keep code on the latest features of the language. Run it locally or in CI a...

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences t...

There have been several security incidents lately that involved compromising GitHub Actions workflows. This has led some to say " GitHub Actions is the weakest link " in publishing and to GitHub publishing a GitHub Actions security roadmap update . But saying it's an issue and acknowledging the fact is one thing, but you still need to do the mitigation work today so you are not going to be the next headline. So this post is going to outline 3 things to do so you can publish to PyPI securely w...

Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular ) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model. Immediately, it’s really something to behold when you pick it up for the first time, it feels weirdly thin, pretty much everyone I’ve showed it to has...

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. Typically I learn way more than two things. For instance, in my o3 geoguessr post, I started out with the idea that most AI prompts probably don’t work, and I ended up learning that newer OpenAI models have lost o3’s ability to ge...

I don't know much about dithering. But when I visit other people's sites and they dither their images in cool ways I always wonder how they do it. So in case anyone is wondering, here's my current method for dithering these pink images. Obligatory example image for when I undo this 2 months from now and no one knows wtf I am talking about: Edit: Almost like I know myself to well — the pictures now look like this instead: Which is covered in the post. Read more on the site...

I had another excellent PLDI this past June. It was my fourth 1 . I continued to meet new people and learn new things! Overall: I got to meet a lot of new people, which was exciting. I had some good chats about research. I asked a question at a talk! I got to show Aaron and Jacob PLDI and see them enjoy it. I missed hanging out with CF Bolz-Tereick and Chris Fallin, the usual suspects at conferences I attend. I’m looking forward to next year. This post is more about the conference than...

In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals. Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the propos...